Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Culturally Responsive Education: Culturally Responsive Educators

The Goal of Culturally Responsive Education

"There are several recurrent trends in how formal school curricula deal with ethnic diversity that culturally responsive teachers need to correct. Among them are avoiding controversial issues such as racism, historical atrocities, powerlessness, and hegemony; focusing on the accomplishments of the same few high-profile individuals repeatedly and ignoring the actions of groups; giving proportionally more attention to African Americans than other groups of color; decontextualizing women, their issues, and their actions from their race and ethnicity; ignoring poverty; and emphasizing factual information while minimizing other kinds of knowledge (such as values, attitudes, feelings, experiences, and ethics). Culturally responsive teaching reverses these trends by dealing directly with controversy; studying a wide range of ethnic individuals and groups; contextualizing issues within race, class, ethnicity, and gender; and including multiple kinds of knowledge and perspectives. It also recognizes that these broad-based analyses are necessary to do instructional justice to the complexity, vitality, and potentiality of ethnic and cultural diversity."

Text source: Gay, Geneva. "Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. (2001 AACTE Outstanding Writing Award Recipient)." Journal of Teacher Education, vol. 53, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2002, pp. 106+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/. Accessed 15 Nov. 2021.